capitalism
Of course the young like socialism – they’re taught to
It beggars belief that Jeremy Corbyn can, with a straight face, announce that capitalism has failed and we’d all be…
Welcome to the hard centre – and the future of British politics
The Conservative party has to move beyond Brexit and leaders: what is it going to be about? I suggest it…
Extraordinary power and simplicity: Lehman Trilogy reviewed
Stefano Massini’s play opens with a man in a frock-coat reaching New York after six weeks at sea. The year…
Interview: Meet Mariana Mazzucato, big-state capitalism’s new champion
‘It was Plato who said storytellers rule the world,’ observes Mariana Mazzucato, her powerful voice tempered with a beaming smile,…
From Stansted to corporate swank: superstructuralism has a lot to answer for
Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of…
Letters
What do the Tories offer? Sir: I have been hoping that someone more eloquent than me would respond to your…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
Heavy-handed
Oliver Cotton is an RSC stalwart who looks like a man born to greatness. Google him. He has the fearless…
Derek Jacobi as Mercutio is half-genius, half-prank: Romeo and Juliet at the Garrick reviewed
Out come the stars in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. He musters a well-drilled, celebrity-ridden crew but they can’t quite…
How capitalism really works
Deirdre McCloskey has been at work for many years on a huge project: to explain why the world has become…
We don’t need research to change banking culture. We need jail sentences
Was the Financial Conduct Authority leaned on by the Chancellor to scrap its ‘review of banking culture’? Or did it…
How hard should we fight Black Friday?
The veneer of civilisation is easily cracked, as anyone who has followed Donald Trump’s Twitter feed will know. This Friday,…
An Inspector Calls is poisonous, revisionist propaganda - which is why the luvvies love it
What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…
Capitalism’s most dangerous enemies are on the right
Friends of capitalism feared that the events since 2007 — the financial collapses, bailouts, deficits and austerity — would produce…
The real power of free markets: not efficiency, but innovation and dumb luck
The greatest mistake made by conservatism was its overly close relationship with neo-classical economics. This was a marriage of convenience:…
Paul Mason's Postcapitalism is proof that the left is out of ideas
The literary emissions of the left are hardly ever enjoyable, but they can be instructive. Last year Thomas Piketty’s Capital…
The world belongs to Taylor Swift now. There will be no free-trial period
All hail Taylor Swift. How she must give baby boomers the fear. Not just baby boomers. Also those who came…
David Starkey’s diary: Why don’t we celebrate the triumphs of private dentistry?
To the dentist. And for an extraction. I hadn’t had a tooth out in decades. But the twinges when I…
The art of Coke
In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was premièred, Henry Ford manufactured his millionth Model-T (‘a million of anything…
Only capitalism can save Nigeria
Abuja was eerily quiet when I arrived. The capital of Nigeria is normally bustling, but that morning the wide boulevards…
Why are students of curation being taught to ignore the public and be suspicious of enterprise?
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
The self-delusion that makes people go to festivals – me included
I wouldn’t describe myself as a veteran of the summer festival circuit, but I’ve been to enough to have a…
Piketty’s decaff Marxism would be just as oppressive and intrusive as the old variety
If a title works once, the chances are it will work again. Half the punch of Marx’s masterwork is in…
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Cartoons
Here’s what’s wrong with the ‘public sector ethos’
Matthew Parris 14 November 2015 9:00 am
An infuriating benefit of readers’ online comments beneath the efforts of a columnist like me is that as you read…